Fibers create surreal nature trail at Michener

In Greek mythology, the weaver goddess Athena punished her acolyte Arachne by turning her into a spider. Bucks County fiber artist Ted Hallman wields a much kinder hand. He knits trees out of hemp, weaves clouds from copper wire and beads, and creates waterfalls with rainbow-hued strips of cloth.

"Suspended Harmonies," on view at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown through March 3, is an installation created with wire, yarn and fabric that transforms its compact gallery space into a miniature landscape. You don't actually view the exhibit as much as experience it, as if on a stroll through a surreal nature trail, surrounded by objects woven from a host of fibers.

Some are natural and some man-made, with the majority suspended on steel armatures hanging from the ceiling or walls.

Hallman's woven landscape fits right in with the Michener's wealth of landscape paintings by such Pennsylvania masters as Garber, Redfield, Schofield, Folinsbee and Baum. "For many years I've come here to look at the landscapes by local artists, some of whom my dad knew. In this exhibit I wanted to portray different elements of landscape made from a variety of fiber materials. I feel that this environment will seem at home here," Hallman says.

Hallman, 78, a leading figure in modern textile design as an art form since the late 1950s, grew up in Souderton. "Both of my parents attended art school, and the house was full of works in progress," he says. His father, in fact, studied under N.C. Wyeth, and became a painter of regional renown — some of his works are in the permanent collection of the Michener.

Hallman intended to follow in his father's footsteps.

He earned a BFA in painting from Temple University and an MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., but while pursuing textiles as a minor there, he changed his course. "That was a major turning point for me. I realized I was not a painter, but really a textile person, a fiber artist," he says.

Clearly, it was the right decision for a guy who had fashioned a fiber representation of the human nervous system — complete with a brain and a spinal cord composed of strings — as a sixth- grade project, and who built his own floor loom by the end of high school. Hallman's work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Art Institute of Chicago, and Brooklyn Museum of Art, among many others.

Hallman has had two shows at the Allentown Art Museum — one in 1998 and another in 2003. His "Versatile Visionary" exhibit of textile works at the Banana Factory in 2008 was curated by Michener's new director and CEO, Lisa Tremper Hanover.

Although Hallman has a studio in Lederach, Montgomery County, most of the 16 or so individual components that make up "Suspended Harmonies" were created this summer in Hallman's studio in Santa Fe.

"Everything is either hanging or suspended — most of the pieces were developed from the top down," he says. "All the elements in the installation were meant to be seen and experienced almost simultaneously. They were meant to harmonize together, much like instruments when making music."

Each of the exhibit's components seem to hover in space, like musical notes. Bakelite beads in brilliant turquoise gently rain from clouds formed from copper wire; tree trunks woven from chartreuse-dyed acrylic rug yarn seem rooted, yet appear to float upward. Hallman makes no distinction between natural or man-made materials — color and texture rule in his art.

Sometimes the result is tantalizing, with trees formed from glossy black polyurethane packing tape of a woven texture that just begs to be touched. But there are stern "Do Not Touch" labels everywhere. "Being a fiber artist, it's all about texture. You can easily relate to it, since these pieces, just like ourselves, are clothed in fibers and color," Hallman says. "Think of these objects as avant-garde garments."

They're not only avant-garde, they're also colorful. Some of Hallman's colors are unabashedly garish. He even has the often gaudy palette of Pennsylvania impressionist Fern Coppedge soundly beat. That chartreuse tree, for example, or the sprays of vibrant green acrylic ribbon adorned with amethyst stones that evoke a sort of tropical plant, give the show a happy, storybook gaiety. Strips of cotton, rayon, silk and shower curtain material, all in a prismatic array of hues, stream downward from a wire cloud, adorned with turquoise beads. "It's a fiber art color experience more than just a rainbow," Hallman says.

Hallman says weaving, actually, is not quite the process in this work. "The process is a looping, similar to crocheting," he says. "I sometimes use my fingers, sometimes large hooks."

Nor is what he does technically knitting. "I call it 'sprang technique' for want of a better description. It looks like knitting, but I don't use knitting needles. Maybe it's more like warp knitting," he says.